Journey of a Salesforce Geek

What’s in for CPQ down the road?

Last week I attended Salesforce’s CPQ (previously known as Steelbrick) Roadmap Webinar. During the presentation, the speakers, Dan Milbrath, talked about what users of CPQ can hope to see down the line.

As a note, before continuing, everything in this article falls under Safe Harbor and no purchasing decisions should be made based on anything seen in this post.

Right now, the main goals that Salesforce has for CPQ are:

Performance and Scalability

Lightning CPQ enhancements

Lightning for Billing

Extending the platform

From these goals, some key elements were called out. In terms of performance and scalability, like much of other portions of Salesforce, more business logic is being moved over to the browser, rather than being server side. This is to be able to reduce processing and increase the speed. As part of this, they are also working on asynchronous processing and additional caching features.

Salesforce is also working to move more of the data into the core model. This makes me very happy, as to me it means that they are working towards CPQ (Steelbrick) no longer being an installed application, which can cause some hairiness at times.

They are also investing more time into API enhancements. This includes better documentation and API interfaces similar to other areas of Salesforce – yay! In addition, they are working to leverage the Lightning framework in order to give more control over for Lightning users.

The last thing that was discussed during the Webinar was the new Winter 18 release for CPQ. There are not too many changes in this release, but the highlights that Dan called out are:

Overall, I found the 30 min Webinar to be a useful resource in gaining a better understanding of what Salesforce sees as a top priority in their roadmap for CPQ, and I highly recommend getting invited to the next one.